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Pomerance: Cleaning up our elections

By Steve Pomerance

Posted:
09/30/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT

The Daily Camera's story of a week ago "Judge tosses Boulder ballot case, says there's no right to a secret vote" discussed a case brought by the Citizens Center, a Colorado organization. This group's claim, in short, is that the mail ballot election system used by some Colorado counties would allow anyone with a modicum of skill to match names to votes, given that they can get access to the ballots, envelopes, and county data-bases as allowed by the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA).

This would violate the Colorado constitution, Article VII, Section 8, which states in part, "All elections by the people shall be by ballot, and in case paper ballots are required to be used, no ballots shall be marked in any way whereby the ballot can be identified as the ballot of the person casting it. The election officers shall be sworn or affirmed not to inquire or disclose how any elector shall have voted. In all cases of contested election in which paper ballots are required to be used, the ballots cast may be counted and compared with the list of voters, and examined under such safeguards and regulations as may be provided by law."

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There is a fascinating discussion of this issue with Chaffee County officials on the Citizens Center website. I came away believing that their concern is valid. Boulder County, which has used the same system, is proposing to make significant changes in an attempt to mitigate this concern. The fundamental problem is that the envelopes have the name of the voter and a code that can be matched to the coding on the ballot. (So it's clear, these problems are specific to the few counties that use this particular system.)

Additionally the Citizens Center points out that the companies that print the ballots also mail them, so that if there is any coding, these companies also could match votes to voters, creating a data "gold mine." And that even if CORA were changed so that the election results couldn't be independently verified (which would be bad policy in my view, as well as a possible violation of Section 8 above), names and ballots could still be matched by people in the clerk's office.

Mail ballots have other unavoidable problems, such as the potential for vote selling and voter coercion. In addition, there is the issue of ballots being mailed out to people no longer in the area; one person told me he still gets a ballot for his brother, who moved to Florida years ago. These issues do not occur with polling place elections, so long as voters can pick their own ballots and are not forced to take a ballot with a number tied to their name. Our secretary of state could usefully spend some of his time working with the county clerks to come up with "best practices" to clean up these problem areas.

Our primary system also has fundamental flaws. Colorado's electorate is roughly evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters. But only party members get to vote in primaries. Because people with stronger viewpoints are generally more motivated to participate, the results tend toward candidates closer to the fringe.

California is experimenting with an alternative system that may produce less polarized outcomes. As their secretary of state describes it: "Under the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, all candidates running in a primary election, regardless of their party preference, will appear on a single Primary Election ballot and voters can vote for any candidate. The top two overall vote-getters -- not the top vote-getter from each qualified party and anyone using the independent nomination process -- will move on to the General Election."

The Electoral College, in which each state has one "elector" for each senator and representative, is also overdue for change. The EC grants voters in small states excess influence, destroying the notion of equality. Plus, with most states using an EC winner-take-all system, voters in the minority parties are effectively disenfranchised, leading to less reason for all voters to participate. The result is that a small number of voters in a few swing states decide the election. At a minimum, we should allocate EC votes in proportion to the actual vote. And while we're changing all this, let's switch voting to Saturday and Sunday, making it easier to participate.

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